By Rick Vacek | April 16, 2025
As The University of Texas at Dallas continues to deepen its international education footprint, Dr. Carol Cirulli Lanham is one of the many administrators and faculty members who are walking that walk.
But the experienced traveler’s first trip to Australia last fall was an especially important step. Cirulli Lanham visited Deakin University’s Melbourne Burwood campus for three weeks as a Fulbright Specialist.
Her larger mission, however, was the continued growth of the Virtual Exchange/Collaborative Online International Learning (VE/COIL) program, which enables UT Dallas students to connect in online projects with their peers in other countries.
Cirulli Lanham is the coordinator. That also means being an ambassador.
“It’s all about the networking,” she said.
She was able to network with Deakin thanks to Dr. Jennifer Hilton Montero, Senior Director for International Initiatives and Fulbright Scholar Liaison at UT Dallas.
Hilton Montero has established partnerships with 80 to 100 universities around the world, and Deakin is one of two in Australia.
“UT Dallas has a very good reputation as a research institution. I think where we’ve really improved our reputation is in our global engagement,” she said. “We’ve opened our two offices abroad (in New Delhi, India, and Lagos, Nigeria) and are really reaching out and connecting people. People are seeing us as an on-the-forefront global university.”
VE/COIL is an ideal way for students to build relationships and see if they might like to go from a virtual exchange to an in-person experience. UT Dallas faculty members will lead 25 such trips this summer, dramatically up from just two in 2022.
“It’s a great foundational model for our international education,” Hilton Montero said.
Developing VE/COIL for UT Dallas students was foremost in Cirulli Lanham’s mind when she was chosen for the Fulbright Specialist Program, a U.S. State Department partnership with more than 160 countries that annually awards about 9,000 merit-based scholarships to study, teach, conduct research and exchange ideas. (Its funding recently was frozen by the U.S. State Department.)
To give VE/COIL time to germinate at UT Dallas, she kept her Fulbright appointment on hold through most of the four-year window while discussing possible destinations with Hilton Montero.
Australia seemed like a good fit because the University’s partnership with Deakin is among its most established (it began in 2017), and Cirulli Lanham had never been Down Under. But it still took two coincidental meetings to make Deakin her destination.
The first came when Dr. Wade Halvorson, Theme Director of Deakin’s Faculty of Business and Law, visited UT Dallas in search of international study opportunities. His host suggested that he meet Cirulli Lanham and talk about VE/COIL.
“One of our imperatives at Deakin is to internationalize our work, so I was on the lookout for making connections,” Halvorson said. “When the COIL opportunity came up, it just seemed like a good, straightforward way of putting our universities together.”
Halvorson, in turn, suggested that Cirulli Lanham meet his supervisor, Dr. Colin Higgins, Deputy Dean of the Deakin Business School. It just so happened that when she was teaching in Paris in June 2023, Higgins was there, too, on one of his regular trips to meet with Deakin’s partner institutions.
Higgins agreed to sponsor her project, Co-operative Virtual Learning Across Borders, and had a specific Fulbright opening in mind.
“If you can find a host, it often can be a stronger application,” Hilton Montero said. “This really helps because if a partner university hasn’t really institutionalized Fulbright and doesn’t know how processes work and what’s entailed, it can be a daunting process for them and they may not be able to come through.”
There was only one problem: It wasn’t approved by the Fulbright Commission until early 2024, which didn’t allow enough time to arrange a spring excursion.
Cirulli Lanham delayed it until autumn. It proved worth the wait … and worth going the distance.
“Australia seemed so far away, once upon a time,” she said. “And now it just feels like our partnership is so strong, I think it’s a good thing for UT Dallas. It’s just one plane ride away.”
Higgins didn’t just facilitate the trip. He flew in some of Deakin’s strategic global partners for a three-day symposium – appropriately, during International Education Week – that he and Cirulli Lanham led in the final days of her stay.
“We were just a dream team together,” she said. “It turned out so much better than I could have even imagined. I never could have dreamed of something like flying in people from all over the world. It also was impressive to see how their faculty showed up, Wade being one of them.
“Colin Higgins is an amazing person. Like Wade said, he makes things happen.”
But so does Halvorson. He and his colleagues made sure Cirulli Lanham felt included and at ease through her entire stay.
“They showed me how it’s done,” she said. “They never forgot about me in those three weeks. They checked on me on the weekend. They took me out to dinner. They took me to the movies. Everything about it was just so high quality.”
It was comfortable for another reason: Deakin’s Melbourne Burwood campus is remarkably similar to UT Dallas. They were founded just five years apart (1974 vs. 1969), and each is around 30,000 in enrollment and is located in a suburb just outside a major city.
The fact that Deakin is outside Melbourne, routinely ranked among the most livable cities in the world, made it that much better.
“It’s all the things you’ve seen in the movies,” Cirulli Lanham said. “I loved it. It’s the people – the people are amazing.”
She has accomplished so much in her career and in her life.
The Professor of Instruction in Sociology in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences has earned numerous teaching awards and was named to The University of Texas System Academy of Distinguished Teachers.
She has traveled all over Europe on numerous occasions and also has visited South America, Asia and Africa. She has lived in Rome.
She considers managing VE/COIL her dream job.
And yet she says this about her Australian adventure:
“I’ve had a lot of amazing experiences, and I just have to say: Maybe that’s the peak so far.”
*****
Related story: